Customers can opt to try the service for a fortnight or have up to 25 voicemails converted.

SpinVox offers next-generation speech-to-text services for mobile phones. Users voicemails are delivered directly to their mobile phone through a SpinVox integrated push technology platform.

SpinVox won the Best Innovative Service category at the Mobile News Awards 2005 while CEO Christina Domecq has been nominated as a finalist for the 2005 UK Technology Innovation and Growth Award in the Technology Entrepreneur of the Year category.

SpinVox has also attracted the attention of some of the largest high street mobile retailers and distributors and has already signed deals with The Carphone Warehouse The Link KJC Mobile Phones and Hugh Symons.

4U Business head of marketing Peter Haddock said: In a fast moving business environment our customers needs are always changing and we reflect this by expanding and updating our products and services to ensure weve got the right offering for them.

He added: We are confident that SpinVoxs voicemail-to-text service is going to be very popular with 4U Business customers saving them valuable time and money while increasing their productivity.

Above all SpinVox makes voicemail simpler and more effective for both caller and recipient.

Deals will replicate those on offer through its direct retail outlets at Superdrug stores and through its direct telesales channel.

A 3 spokesperson said:

It should launch in the next two weeks. We have a great high street presence already and we have been doing sales direct over the phone for some time.

This is a natural extension of that. A lot of our subscriber base falls into the 18- to 30-year-old age bracket which is very comfortable with browsing and buying online.

The networks online sales pages will be accessible through its website.

On the high street however 3 has quashed rumours that it has bought up retail space from estate agents to extend its direct retail presence.

There is no truth in it. We are not looking at new retail space said the spokesperson.

The 3G network last week launched its cartoon Critters into cyberspace on the new version of MSN Messenger.

This enables users to view animations as well as text and still pictures. 3s Critters are available as emoticons and wallpapers.

The launch forms part of an integrated advertising campaign on MSN and includes banner advertising.

Its about getting people to engage with the brand. It is a good way to reach out to the relevant tech-savvy audience said the 3 spokesperson.

Prior to this people used to send smiley faces on Messenger. Now they can send dancing pandas with angry faces.

Nash spent eight years with Ericsson as UK and Ireland sales director before moving to Generation Telecom to head up the UK service providers sales and marketing activities.

I am still finding my feet but there is huge potential here commented Nash. I was looking for the right opportunity in mobile following the takeover of Generation Telecom by Vodafone.

Elite is a very strong distributor with more than 10 years experience in the industry. It has key agreements in place with all the top manufacturers and has just secured a contract for Vodafone pre-pay.

The new positions are based at the new Phones 4U headquarters in Newcastle.

Phones 4U is pushing for the top spot through its reputation for customer excellence. John Caudwell sees it as very important said a spokesperson for the company.

We are looking for a mix of in-bound and out-bound sales executives as well as customer care agents and new additions to the written complaints team.

According to the spokesperson this represents the next phase of the companys customer excellence initiative.

We have already recruited staff for the shop floor. This is the next stage of recruitment of customer service staff.

Phones 4U is understood to be paying new staff 20000 a year plus commission.

All 70 companies will now be sent a document outlining physical and environmental constraints.

T-Mobile UK managing director Brian McBride has criticised the proposed timescale and process.

McBride also expressed concern about the need to simplify the process and ensure it does not become too complex or expensive.

Vodafone pre-pay customers can now choose text packs for 5 15 or 20 giving them 200 500 or 675 text per month respectively. Pre-pay voice packs are available at 15 for 100 voice minutes per month and 25 for 200 minutes. Voice and text packs can run concurrently.

Until this week Vodafone customers received a daily number of texts and talk-time for a monthly fee losing them if they werent used each day.

A spokesman for Vodafone said: The new packs allow customers to use their text allocation at any time in the 30-day period.

The range of options available has also increased and voice packs as well as text have been added. The packs expire every 30 days and you can either choose to renew or let the pack expire. It offers more flexibility in how people use their phone.

The voice packs are also available with Vodafones Stop The Clock offer which gives customers 60 minutes talk-time for the price of three minutes on evenings and at weekends. A 15 pack could yield 33 hours of talk-time with Stop The Clock.

Thirty-day voice packs are available on Smartplus while the 30-day text packs are available on all pay-as-you-go price plans.

The move comes barely two months after Snook resigned as chairman of The Carphone Warehouse.

He replaces Lord Baker of Dorking who has stepped down from the role.

As non-executive chairman Snook will make strategic decisions but will not be responsible for the day-to-day running of the company.

This is an extremely exciting period in the development of the mobile phone entertainment sector he said.

The mobile phone is becoming a very sophisticated entertainment device a device that will in time rival portable music players such as the iPod. Over the next few years we will see this sector grow tremendously.

MonsterMob delivers 20 million downloads of mobile content each month It operates in 18 countries and is actively seeking opportunities in others.

See Business Watch page 16

Carphone Warehouse CEO Charles Dunstone said: Its no coincidence that weve chosen today to launch our new Fresh tariffs. The mobile phone business is not an airline business. The cost of phones and calls has been falling every year for the 15 years weve been in existence. There is a big market for simple low-cost no-frills everyday calls. Weve helped create it. Were the price and service leader. Well stay that way.

In the days following the launch of easyMobile Virgin Mobile issued a press release detailing the catches it had uncovered in the easyMobile offering. Consumer gotchas included a demand to spend 5 every three months or face a 75p per month standing charge and a 5 handling fee to leave the service. The facility to become overdrawn by up to 10 leads to a 50p text alerting customers to the fact and there are charges for voicemail retrieval.

Perhaps the biggest catch of all though is that easyMobile charges customers to top up. Its 1 a pop using the customer service centre or 40p if you do it electronically.

In the name of research we enrolled for easyMobile the day its website went live. Imagine my surprise to receive an e-mail from easyMobile CEO Frank Rasmussen a week later responding to the Virgin Mobile charges and offering a cut-price introductory tariff (see news page x).

Analysts Strand Consult think the spat will have several long-term effects. Unlocking phones will become a national pastime. An increased focus on cost per minute – hinted at in Dunstones rallying call – will mean that the best pre-pay customers will switch to web based MVNOs.

Strand Consult believes – perhaps a little unrealistically – that Virgin Mobile will launch a me-too copy of easyMobiles web-based offering which will strengthen the hand of both companies.

What of the traditional network operators? Two things might happen. Subsidised pre-pay handsets may eventually disappear much to the relief of all concerned. And the mass desertion of pre-pay customers foreseen in Strand Consults scenario will allow the operators to concentrate their efforts on rewarding high-spending contract customers.

And then there are the persistent rumours that Vodafone is planning to dip its toe in the MVNO market through an alliance with Asda.

No sooner had the ripples subsided from Franks e-mail (sent at 13:36 on Thursday 17 March) than a press release from The Carphone Warehouse landed in the editorial in-box at 16:03 the same afternoon announcing cuts to the cost of mobile calls and text messages on Fresh to 5p for all calls and 1.7p for all texts.

Dunstone noted: We made a commitment to customers that Fresh will always be the price leader and we are honouring that. In addition Fresh offers customers a personal service plus a great choice of handsets. This is all without the hidden costs that easyMobile launched with.

Industry analysts suggest that in the short term at least. Virgin Mobile will suffer most at the hands of easyMobile.

Simon East founder of the mobile photo-upload software provider Cogima commented: Virgin needs to decide whether it wants to be a cost-driven MVNO or if it would be better offering an end-to-end service going head-to-head on handset prices and slogging it out in the market as a real network.

Historically MVNOs have not been given full access to the data services offered by the parent network. EasyMobile is following that trend by differentiating on price. It is not interested in providing higher-end data services. Its selling SIMs not phones.

MVNOs are predominantly marketing outfits East observes and they trade on their brands with a value proposition.

The challenge for the established network operators is to come up with services that people want to use he said arguing that MMS has been an almost total failure for the networks because it didnt meet basic user needs.

I hope that networks will take the activity in the MVNO space as their cue to go out and do some basic customer research to find out what their customers want to do with the technology that is available.

Virgin Mobile corporate affairs director Steven Day doesnt see his network falling victim to easyMobiles success. I dont know who is going to be affected most – I guess there will probably be some impact across the board he said.

The Virgin Mobile brand is rock solid and has mass-market appeal. Easy has a good brand but just doesnt have our presence.

Day applauded Stelios and Easy for giving it a go however. Its good because their entry will stimulate activity in the market – and whenever that happens Virgin Mobile does well out of it. We dont fear competition. For the past year at least 3 has been chucking the kitchen sink at the market in an attempt to increase its base. Weve continued to grow and we havent been buying customers.

Virgin Mobiles distribution is now widespread with a strong high street presence. It does have a website but according to Day only 10% of net growth is down to the Internet.

The Internet is just one string to our bow Day claimed. It makes a valuable contribution but its not an integral part. Being a web-based offering is limiting. EasyMobile isnt going to be offering paper vouchers. A lot of its potential customers dont have credit and debit cards.

O2 has just reported 1.3 million net connections. Its fair to suggest that 10% of them came from the web. Fresh has achieved a total customer base of around 130000 since launch. Assuming easyMobile matches these it may cream off 130000 customers which is neither here nor there in the great scheme of things.

Day is convinced that sexy handsets drive sales and motivate the customer. People are turned on by size and sexiness not functionality and thats not the market Stelios has gone for. Virgin Mobile is skewed toward more toward fashion than the bargain basement end of the market.

If value were the primary driver Day claimed One 2 One would have cleaned up years ago and kept its dominance. Before T-Mobile they were always 20 per cent cheaper whichever way you cut it.

Day insists that Virgin Mobile is good value for money. We dont need to cut prices because we are already cheaper he claimed (though he was speaking before easyMobile announced its introductory 6p voice minute and 2p text offering).

Other networks can beat easyMobile too said Day. That gives the lie to easyMobiles primary claim that it is the cheapest. Once you remove that the rest collapses like a house of cards.

Carphone Warehouse CEO Andrew Harrison questions easyMobiles apparent obsession with Virgin Mobile. It ought to be looking at all MVNOs he said. After all we went some way to spoiling its launch with new Fresh tariffs and subsequent announcements.

He adds: Start ups are always prepared to spend money to get their first customers. But the price cuts easyMobile has announced so soon after launch makes it look as if it is a bit desperate. If it was attracting customers in quantity with its initial offering it would not have cut its rates. I dont believe easyMobiles prices are sustainable at this level.

So whats the thinking behind the new aggressive Fresh?

Fresh has been in our portfolio for quite a long time says Harrison. For a while weve been working with T-Mobile on a new package that would enable us to be more competitive. Weve also put a lot of investment into stabilising the platform which will enable us to add a significant number of customers.

Harrison said he would be positioning Fresh in the low frills sector which he claimed has great appeal to a significant number of customers who just want to make cheap voice calls and are not interested in GPRS or picture messaging.

A lot of people are going after the low frills sector. We must serve all sectors of the market and we intend to become market leader in the low frills space. We dont intend to let people from other industries come into this marketplace and turn the economics upside down.

See WebWatch page 52

Under the terms of the deal between the mobile network and Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) the Dome has now been renamed The O2 but at a conference to announce the project last week O2 marketing director Russ Shaw insisted that the network will be much more than just the name on the front of building.

Turning great sponsorships into interactive partnerships has been a big part of O2s success over our first three years he said. Whether its Big Brother Arsenal the England Rugby Union team the O2 FHM Cup the O2 Music Wireless Festival or the wide range of other music events were involved with weve used mobile interactivity to enhance these experiences for people.

Shaw claimed the network would put its customers at the heart of The O2. I dont believe there is another partnership like this anywhere in the world he said.

The project builds on O2s previous and existing investments in music entertainment and sport from Capital Radios Party in the Park events and English National Opera to ongoing sponsorship of the England national rugby union team Arsenal FC and the O2 FHM Cup.

The centrepiece of the multi-billion-pound development set to open in early 2007 will be an indoor arena for up to 23000 fans that will host up to 150 world-class music entertainment and sport events in its first year of opening.

Within the facility there will be the O2 Music Club with a capacity of more than 2000 an ice rink called the O2 Ice Pad and a bubble-shaped world-class exhibition space and a vibrant entertainment district featuring a variety of bars restaurants retail and leisure facilities.

Shaw said he believed that being the headline sponsor for such an incredible complex would go a long way in persuading customers to join O2 and would give its 14 million customers a reason not to churn to other networks particularly as the network plans to gives its customers plenty of VIP privileges.

All O2 customers will be able to enjoy special VIP status at The O2 he said. While it will be a national venue with broad appeal O2 customers will be able to enjoy unique benefits that significantly enhance the experience. On opening there will be a unique event available only to O2 customers.

O2 and AEG will integrate state of the art entertainment and mobile technology to create a range of interactive services. This will include easy-to-use mobile ticketing Refresh Bubbles where O2 customers can relax recharge their phones try new mobile entertainment services and have a drink or a massage and a unique O2 Experience store.

There will also be event guides and downloads and exclusive music and entertainment information. These will be accessible via the O2 Active and i-mode mobile Internet portals on O2 handsets.

Other benefits will include priority access to tickets for all events a members-only bar and VIP hospitality lounge with entry only for O2 customers.

With the opening of the complex still two years away however O2 is planning to take full advantage of its links with AEG to create mobile entertainment content available exclusively on O2 phones and devices such as the XDA.

In the past year AEG has presented events for acts including U2 Elton John Usher Paul McCartney and Coldplay plus the Grammy Awards the Academy Awards and the New Orleans Jazz Festival.

O2 will capitalise on this by working with AEG to create a range of mobile entertainment content available exclusively on O2 phones and devices such as the XDA.

Unlike other arenas The O2 will be designed for music offering great acoustics for the performers and modern facilities for the fans said David Campbell newly appointed president and CEO of AEG Europe. We are currently finalising our first raft of events for The O2 which we look forward to announcing in the coming weeks and months.

Kondor joins Nokias existing Nokia Enhancement distributors which are Dextra Data Select Clockwork Logistics and Unique Distribution.